The Northeast Kingdom

Chapter 15

It was hours before dawn at the farmhouse they had broken into. The lingering stink of cigarette smoke and the childproof catches on the lower kitchen cabinets were the only signs of an adult ever having been in residence. At some point children and pets had taken over. Food was ground into the shag carpeting, toys lay overturned on the stairs, and a handprint smudged the bottom third of every wall and door. So lived-in was the house that the absence of little voices and the tapping of paws brought out for Rebecca the deathlike stillness of the town.

Rebecca had been paired with Coe for the hour’s journey from the country club, sitting against his back as they ran without headlights along property lines and iced fences, slipping across the countryside like field mice. He had worked the sled hard through the unspoiled snow like a dirt bike in soft sand, while she had been vigilant for prisoners.

Once they reached the house, Kells made each of them take a turn tooling around the yard behind the barn before letting them rest. Rebecca found the sled easy to operate, less like a motorcycle than a moped. Kells explored the barn, silo, and dairy stables while Rebecca took the first watch at the upstairs windows, too distracted to sleep. She understood why he liked the location of the farmhouse — the view from the front looked west over a mile of fields, as far as they could see through the falling snow — but Rebecca found it too inviting and open. She thought of all the questions she wanted to ask Kells, but when he came to relieve her she had been crying, and she hid her face and said nothing as she returned downstairs.

The scent of dog urine puffed out of the rocking chair cushion as Rebecca sat in the playroom, bundled in her coat and a pair of ski pants she discovered in the downstairs closet. She tried to stay warm as she listened to Kells’s boots on the creaky floor above. Mia sat unmoving on the small sofa, wrapped in a heavy sage-green quilt, her sad, vague gaze boring a hole of memory in the jelly-stained wall. Dr. Rosen sat in a corner scribbling on country club stationery, presumably a letter to his wife. Young Coe fought sleep like a little boy, embarrassed as he roused himself from dozing, only to blink and nod off again.

Rebecca found herself neither tired nor hungry. As she had learned in the days following the breakup of her marriage, the human body needs little to sustain itself when overstimulated emotionally. Fear piled up like the snowdrifts outside.

Later the footfalls changed overhead, as Tom Duggan relieved Kells. Boots came down the stairs, a refrigerator opened, glass clinked, light glowed in the kitchen. The refrigerator door light went out and a chair scraped linoleum. Coe jerked awake as Rebecca stood, but she waved him back to sleep.

The kitchen was dark-paneled and dim around a deeply scored central island. The red vinyl backs of the kitchen table chairs were cat-clawed and oozing cushion foam. Blood throbbed in her head as she watched the manslayer, Kells, drinking water and plucking sardines from an open tin, eating them one by one.

He saw her there and slid his meal toward her. “Protein,” he said.

She declined. He switched on a small, sticky television and they watched footage from the ADX Gilchrist video feed. The prisoners lay in the corridors and on cell beds, coughing without sound, their hands pulling at their throats.

The Cuban’s police radio was coiled in front of Kells like a snake, hissing occasionally. Kells popped another sardine in his mouth, swallowing it back like medicine, and she did not fear him. She sat down.

“Why haven’t you contacted anyone at Doomsday?” she asked him.

“Because it’s better if they don’t know I’m here. That way they can’t ask me to stop.”

“That agency is only about two years old, I think. What did you do before that?”

“I was with the Department of State.”

His precise wording was telltale. “The CIA,” she said.

Kells ate a sardine.

“In Cuba?” she said.

“For a brief time. Mainly in Central America.”

“How many years total?”

“Twenty-one.”

“That’s how you know about Inkman. You’re retired?”

“Doomsday is a second career.”

“What did you do for them in Central America?”

“Embassy work. Diplomatic cover. Cold recruiting, handling.”

“Embassy work?” she said, unbelieving. “You learned how to do what you did to those men’s faces in an diplomacy school?”

Kells took a long drink of water from a plastic Rugrats cup. “These Marielitos are a bad bunch. That’s why Trait kept seven alive for himself. He has four left, and he’ll have to work to keep them happy. The convict said the others’ deaths would be avenged. Disrespecting the corpse, that’s a cultural thing. We need to make these convicts crazy.”

“You have a plan,” she said. “I think you’ve had a plan the entire time.”

“Running straight at Trait will get us nowhere. You’ve researched him, you know that. Inkman — Hodgkins, as you knew him — he is the weak link.”

“The Cuban told you this?”

“No one told me this, I know it myself. Inkman is no hardened criminal like these others. He’s a bitter bastard who thought he had pulled off the crime of the century and now knows he’s in this thing way over his head. These aren’t his people. He’s used to liaising with corrupt generals over lemonade, running countries by remote control. Inkman is vulnerable here, and Trait is vulnerable through him. They’ve made the inn their headquarters.”

Rebecca was shocked. The inn.

“There and the police station,” Kells went on, “where most of the weapons are stockpiled. We’re up against about fifty men — thirty prisoners and roughly twenty ex-cons. They have the center of town all sealed up and the access roads barricaded.”

He pulled a brochure out of his back pocket, unfolding the town map from the inn. The town was almost a perfect diamond, rotated slightly clockwise. The prison was situated due north, the common and the inn just south of the diamond’s center. Kells tapped the east-northeast corner. “We’re out here,” he said. “We’ve got to degrade their defenses bit by bit, all the while moving closer to the center of town. Hit them hard and fast and keep moving.”

“And that doesn’t seem the least bit unrealistic to you? With the few people you have left?”

“Do we have a choice?” He folded the map and shoved it back into his pocket.

“What is ‘Tick Tock?’ ”

He selected another sardine. “The trademark of an infamous Central American CIA agent, code-named Clock. Clock was ‘old’ CIA. The invisible hand and all that, legends and ghosts. The breeze you only feel at night, the birdcall from an empty tree. Clock was sangfroid personified. Except for one thing.”

She waited. “What?”

“He never existed. He was a psywar chimera, a Killroy invented to intimidate the natives, but the legend took on a life of its own. The perfect agent: brutal yet principled, unwaveringly loyal, perfectly invisible and therefore blameless. Not plausibly deniable but absolutely deniable. Every unexplained disappearance or massacre, every unsolved atrocity on either side, was eventually attributed to him. The CIA reaped the upside with no downside whatsoever. Very few people at Langley knew the truth.”

“How did you?”

“I was attached to the American embassy in Guatemala, I had to know these things. Inkman spent a year in Central America, so he was definitely familiar with Clock. I’m working on Inkman’s fear. The CIA ruined him completely. Now he thinks he has the upper hand, and Clock being here is like the id of the CIA coming after him again. Much better than a handful of weekenders and an ex-spook doing cop work for nuclear physicists.”

“You’re so certain about Inkman.”

“As the vulnerable point? He’s the one with the terrorist know-how. He’s the one who put this thing together. He’s invaluable to Trait, and the albatross around his neck.”

“And the ricin? If they kill a town full of people in retaliation?”

“Why bother? We’ll still be here. They’ll have to deal with us sooner or later.”

His tone chilled her. Deal with us.

He finished off the water, setting down the cup with finality. “I’m going out to the north barricade before daylight. I want to exert some pressure on them from the inside.”

She didn’t like the thought of him leaving. “Alone?”

“With the kid. He should know a shortcut to get us back here after sunup.”

“Coe?” Rebecca thought of Fern, and felt someone should stand in her place. “He’s only seventeen.”

“All he has to do is lead me out there.”

“The undertaker knows the town.”

“I considered that. But that would leave you alone.”

“Alone? Dr. Rosen, Marshall Polk—”

“The old man is a fighter all right, but not too agile. The good doctor is still in denial. And the girl — Mia? That would leave you and Coe.”

“Then how can you expect to beat these prisoners?”

“We have a lot on our side. I don’t need more than two or three warm bodies who can fight.”

“You’re saying that Tom Duggan is a fighter?” He reminded her about the undertaker’s dead mother. “That’s how it was in Guatemala. Indigenous people robbed of their land, their lives stripped away, having no choice but to fight. Not brave men, but desperate men. Men forced to become something they did not think they could be.”

“But Coe,” she said. “He’s just a small-town kid.” Kells pulled out the pager he had scavenged off Terry and copied the phone number onto a piece of napkin. “If you need to move, page me and we’ll rendezvous. But I wouldn’t travel too far on those sleds. The engine noise is like chum in a shark tank.”

They took two sleds, Coe in the lead and Kells behind him with one of the prisoner’s rifles. Rebecca watched from the family room as they faded into the dark cloud of night snow. Barely visible mountains loomed like an electrified prison fence. On the other side was freedom, normality, home.

There was too much time to think, too much time to contemplate the danger awaiting them. She wandered the rooms of the ground floor. The farmhouse rambled, the contents of one room spilling over into the next, playroom to kitchen to family room to den, a swirl of country domesticity, of children and animals turned loose. She felt like a detective investigating a family disappearance, and took care not to disturb or even right the overturned toys. She looked down at an action figure stripped naked, devoid of gender, and thought about being thirty-seven years old and alone.

The telephone cord stretched across the hall floor from the kitchen into the dining room. She turned away, not wanting to hear Dr. Rosen lying to his wife.

She stopped inside the playroom. Mia sat on the threadbare sofa next to an untouched glass of water. “Drink,” said Rebecca, hoping to rouse the girl. Mia looked at her blankly, her short hair flat and defeated. Rebecca touched her quilt-covered shoulder and sat there for a while. A long road of grief lay ahead of Mia with nothing to forestall it.

Dawn came gloomily to the windows. Shoes descended the staircase. Tom Duggan paused in the playroom doorway, tall and dour, looking like a country lawyer in his rumpled undertaker’s suit, then withdrew to the kitchen.

Rebecca patted Mia’s shoulder. She found Tom Duggan standing with his arms crossed, turning as she entered.

“Sorry,” he said. “Didn’t mean to intrude.”

“Not at all. I wasn’t very good company for her.”

“May I ask...?”

She noted the inconsistency of his face, pale cheeks chipped with acne scars beneath a pink and smooth forehead.

“The young man you loaded into the freezer. He was her husband.”

“Terrible,” he said, though his regret was professional and passed quickly. He sized her up as only a box maker can. “I was looking forward to your reading at the library.”

“Oh.” She was surprised he knew who she was. “I was at your dedication two days ago.”

He nodded. It was obviously an unpleasant memory.

A silence passed without any awkwardness. Rebecca asked, “What happened back there, at the country club?”

His face became even more serious as he recalled it. “I’m still not sure. I was taking care of the others in the freezer when he was talking to the prisoner. In Spanish — I don’t speak the language. He arranged the others by the time I was done. Why he cut them, I can’t imagine.”

She told him everything she knew about Kells.

“Do you trust him?” asked Tom Duggan.

“I don’t have a choice right now. None of us do. You saw him. He killed two prisoners and tortured information out of a third.” A small, brittle laugh escaped. “Who’s going to top that?”

“His hands shook a little after you took the rest away.” Tom Duggan seemed reassured by that. “But he seems serious about fighting to take back Gilchrist.” Tom Duggan’s expression darkened.

Marshall Polk entered just then from the opposite doorway, suspenders supporting his waistband below his considerable gut. He had just awoken and he shuffled from side-to-side like an old man doing an impression of a toddler. “Take back?” he said. “It’s all gone. Who’s the crazy one now?”

Tom Duggan said dryly, “I didn’t spend the last six years living over an asbestos mine without a toilet.”

The old man smiled, his wispy hair ridiculous with static as he turned to Rebecca. “This is an old argument, Miss...”

“Loden. Rebecca.”

Polk leaned on the table, fists down, smelling of old man. Each word came slowly, as though he had forgotten the next.

“A town is not a business, Becky, like Tommy here thinks. It’s people and people sometimes die. And Tommy’s an undertaker who won’t let go. Hope someone shows me better consideration when I’m at the end. Don’t plug me in to a machine and pretend I’m dandy.” He looked around the kitchen, rubbing his belly. “Where’s the black?”

Rebecca said, “ ‘The black’?”

“Don’t look so offended. He’s a good shepherd. This town needs a fighter.”

“Now you want to fight?” said Tom Duggan. “What happened to blowing up the town?”

“I want to go out with every tree ablaze. At least I’ll do more than just clean up the bodies.”

Tom Duggan’s slender hand squeezed the torn foam back of a chair. “You think I won’t? This is my fight more than it is yours, Marshall.” He glanced at Rebecca, his manner growing milder. He looked down at his long-fingered hands. “I just hope I can distinguish myself.”

Polk said, “I don’t suffer any self-doubts.”

Tom Duggan said, “The insane rarely do,” Then he turned to Rebecca. “How do you feel about it?”

“If given the choice — fight or escape — I would choose escape.”

“Do you have a choice?”

Rebecca admitted she didn’t.

“None of us do,” said Polk. There was a shimmer of glee in his eye.

Hurried footsteps above, then a hushed voice calling down the stairs. “Hey. Hey.”

Tom Duggan went to the bottom step, Rebecca after him.

Dr. Rosen gripped the banister at the top. “I think I see something.”

Tom Duggan rushed up the stairs, Rebecca followed less enthusiastically. If Dr. Rosen had actually seen anything, he would have come running.

His beige cardigan flapped under his arms and his soft corduroy pant legs shushed as Dr. Rosen led them into a child’s room of bunk beds, board games, and broken toys. Through a window spotted with Pokémon stickers, there was a side view of the barn, old and bowed and lurching, one bent nail away from collapse. Snow was piled thick and heavy on its soft roof.

“Behind the barn. Leading to the trees.”

Rebecca could see the little holes in the knee-high snow. The footprints were recent, winding from the side of the barn to the woods in back.

Tom Duggan straightened. “You haven’t seen anybody?”

Dr. Rosen shook his head nervously. Their growing anxiety confirmed his own distress. “I don’t know how they got there.”

Tom Duggan went to each second-floor window, leaving Dr. Rosen and Rebecca studying the barn together. It was a single pair of footprints. The rest of the snow was clean and unbroken. No footprints approached the house.

“I hoped you were going to tell me I was seeing things,” said Dr. Rosen.

Polk hauled himself over the top step as Tom Duggan returned, shaking his head. Polk came to the window, squinting into the brightness of the morning snow.

“Could be someone hunkered down inside,” he said, “waiting for reinforcements. Or there’s more than one already. They all could have walked in the first man’s footprints.”

“We would have seen them,” said Rebecca. “They couldn’t have followed us through that snow last night.”

Dr. Rosen nodded anxiously. “Kells said that.”

Polk was shaking his head. “Never count out luck.”

The thought of a prisoner stumbling upon them so soon after dawn was unlikely at best. “No one here heard a sled,” said Rebecca, optimistically.

They all agreed on that. It was good to agree. They would have heard something.

Tom Duggan backed away from the window, and in doing so stepped on a squeaky toy. “Sorry,” he said, having startled them with his clumsiness. Then, seizing on their attention, he said, “We have to go out there to take a look.”

“I’ll do it,” said Polk.

Tom Duggan ignored him. “It should probably be two of us.”

“I don’t know,” said Rebecca, nervous now. “Why would a prisoner hide in the barn? Could be Bert or Rita out there, I suppose — but why wouldn’t they have come right up to the house? Unless they’re hurt.” She shook her head quickly, as though she could clear it that way, like the cracked Etch A Sketch lying on the floor. “I don’t like us splitting up.”

Dr. Rosen agreed. “We should wait for Kells.”

Tom Duggan said, “Those are footprints out there. You’re suggesting we do nothing?”

Rebecca said, “Splitting up is a bad idea. If we go, we should all go together.”

“And walk into an ambush?” said Polk.

Rebecca said, “They were hours behind us last night. Kells made certain of that. The snow covered our tracks — there’s no way.” She was trying to convince herself as she tried to convince them.

Then Dr. Rosen’s eyes grew wide. “What if they got to Kells on his way to the barricade?”

She followed that train of thought. “He wouldn’t have told them where we are.”

“How do you know?” said Dr. Rosen. “They could have made him talk.”

“He wouldn’t have to say a word,” said Polk. “His tracks lead right back here.”

“This isn’t helping,” said Tom Duggan. “We heard no engines. And why would they stage this, hiding in a barn? If they knew where we were right now, they would come in here and get us.”

“Then who is it out there?” said Dr. Rosen, exasperated.

Polk started toward the hall. “You three keep talking,” he said. “I’ll be right back.”

“Marshall.” Tom Duggan’s voice was sharp. It turned the old man around. “You’re not going anywhere.” He looked at the others. “In theory, I think Rebecca is right about not splitting up. But he can’t go anywhere with those legs.”

Polk said, “Poor circulation or no circulation, I can hold my own.”

“And the young lady downstairs. We all can’t go together, it’s that simple.” He turned to Dr. Rosen. “Doctor? I’ll go alone if I have to. But we can’t ignore this.”

Dr. Rosen looked stricken.

“I’ll go,” said Rebecca. The others turned in surprise, increasing her anxiety. But she was desperate not to be trapped inside the house in case something went wrong. Outside, at least she could run.

Tom Duggan said, “We’ll get you a chair, Marshall. I’ll bring you a rifle to cover us. You can see the barn all right?”

Polk waved his hand at the window. “I see fine.”

Tom looked to Dr. Rosen one last time.

Dr. Rosen said, “I think they came across Kells’s tracks. I think they followed them back here.”

Tom Duggan said, “Then there’s no sense waiting for him, is there?”

Dr. Rosen’s eyes fell, but when they went downstairs he pulled on his coat. He dressed himself with great care, winding a brown-patterned scarf around his neck and slowly fastening his coat toggles as though preparing his own body for a funeral.

Rebecca found a brown knit cap in the closet, and Tom Duggan put on an ear-flapped hunting cap that looked warm. Mia watched them pull weapons from her dead husband’s hockey duffel. Tom Duggan chose a revolver and took the biathlon rifle up to Polk. Rebecca picked the 9mm Beretta. It looked the newest. She shoved the weapon deep into her coat pocket.

Outside the kitchen door, the air was arctic cold. They waded through snowdrifts past the sleds hidden against the rear of the house. They paused at the corner of the house, like swimmers treading water at the last safety buoy, then started across the open yard toward the barn.

The snow was thick and sandlike. The wind whipped up sheets of curling white, and Rebecca was torn between the impulse to rush ahead to the barn and the dread of actually approaching it. Drooping, snow-burdened trees stood behind the barn like ancients with their heads bowed. She glanced over her shoulder to Polk’s window but could not make him out through the swarm of white.

They reached the sagging corner of the barn. Tom Duggan pointed to Dr. Rosen to stay there, theoretically within sight of Polk, then went ahead with Rebecca, plodding through the snow to the tall double doors.

There were the boot prints, blunted and deep. The barn doors were unlocked and hanging ajar. Snowfall beneath the outside threshold was skimmed back from the door indicating it had been recently pulled open.

Rebecca removed one glove and pulled the heavy pistol out of her coat pocket. Rebecca Loden, author, standing in a near-blizzard with a loaded gun in her hand. She looked up at the sky and the snow spilling out of it.

Tom Duggan hurried past the doors to the far corner of the barn. He pulled off his hunting cap and ducked his head around the corner, two quick glances, pulling back fast. Then he pushed his cap back on his head and crept around the corner.

Rebecca shivered, anticipating a hail of bullets. She twisted to look back at Dr. Rosen, who was hunched under the sagging corner stud, his gun gripped in two gloved hands.

Tom Duggan reappeared, shaking his head. Nothing there.

He retraced his steps next to the stranger’s tracks to the doors. He pulled on the handle and the big door swept open before he could catch it, stopping with a clatter. The entire barn quivered and snow slipped angrily off the roof. Something fluttered inside. Tom Duggan peered into the opening, and so did Rebecca.

There was a half-dismantled tractor, bales of hay stacked high, a rusted jungle gym lying on its side, horse blankets and rusted tools. In the rear sagged a ladderless loft of rotting wood. Below that, a sun-faded billboard advertisement for Barclay cigarettes against the far wall.

Tom Duggan glanced both ways as he stepped inside. Rebecca followed, at once relieved to have dirt under her feet instead of the sucking snow, but wary of the weakened roof overhead. It looked like a dark cloud about to burst.

Tom Duggan pointed out the clumps of snow on the floor, spaced like footsteps, diminishing ahead. Other than the rear of the loft above, the only area hidden from their view was the space behind the stacked bales of hay. That was where the snow droppings led.

Rebecca backed just outside the door so that Dr. Rosen would see her and not panic. He looked miserable, stealing a glance back at the snow-shrouded house. Then she returned to Tom Duggan and started toward the hay.

He moved deliberately. She wondered where he found his courage, or maybe it was simple determination. Maybe “bravery” was a task-specific term. Digging a grave in the frozen earth wasn’t brave, but walking alone to those hay bales was, and yet she supposed the same impulse lay behind each act. Maybe she could be brave too.

A crow lifted from behind the stinking bales of hay, fluttering to the rafters. Tom Duggan grabbed her arm and she grabbed his. Neither of their guns went off. She was ready to turn back, but he kept going forward, now pulling her along with him toward the corner of hay.

There were two bodies. They were seated shoulder to shoulder against the warped wall, inordinately still, one head tipped forward at a ludicrous angle and the other set back crooked, bloodied mouth open. Rebecca recognized Bert and Rita’s cross-country snowsuits and a scream caught in her throat, cutting off all breath.

She was weak with revulsion. Her mind was sluggish and the particulars came to her in waves.

The half-open eyes.

The splayed legs.

The slashed necks.

There was something inside Bert’s mouth. It looked like a piece of paper, pastel blue and wrinkled. Tom Duggan went to him. He had attended to hundreds of dead bodies, but none of them murder victims. He was haggard and red-cheeked. He reached for Bert’s downturned head and pulled the paper from his mouth, then backed away to Rebecca and opened it.

It was a flier. Gilchrist Public Library. Rebecca Loden tonight, reading from her bestselling novel Last Words.

Rebecca stared at the piece of paper, still slow to think. She turned back fearfully to the twin corpses. Their boots were off and she could see their ankles, their severed Achilles tendons.

Rebecca turned and looked wildly about the barn. She remembered the loft overhead, previously dismissed as uninhabitable. He could be anywhere. Panic began to suffocate her.

She ran for the door of the barn as though it were being closed. Outside, she forgot her stride in the high snow and flopped forward on all fours. She expected him there, waiting for her, but it was only Dr. Rosen, a drip hanging off his nose, wondering what was taking them so long.

She ran back through the snow. She ran as though she were being chased, the cold and the flakes disorienting her, fear stinging her eyes. She reached the corner of the house and stumbled past the sleds to the back door, fumbling with the handle. She fell inside, scuttling across the kitchen linoleum as though he were at her heels, knocking over a chair as she hit the corner cabinets and turned holding her gun.

She trained it on the open kitchen door, waiting for him. Noises in the house, shoes on the stairs, like gunshots in her mind. A form filled the doorway, and Dr. Rosen saw her on the floor with the gun and reeled backward into Tom Duggan.

“Shut it!” Rebecca screamed. “Shut the door!”

Tom Duggan shut the door behind them.

“Lock it!” she said.

Tom Duggan turned back to the knob. “There isn’t one.”

“That chair!”

He picked up the chair she had knocked over and jammed it securely under the knob.

Still, Rebecca aimed, training the gun on the part in the window curtain.

“What?” yelled Dr. Rosen, crazed. He hadn’t seen anything. “What is it?”

A form appeared around the center island. Rebecca swung her gun madly, but it was just Polk with the biathlon rifle. She stopped then and set the handgun down on the floor between her legs and stripped off her knit cap and unzipped her coat collar, choking for air.

Tom Duggan told the others about the bodies in the barn, then showed them the flier.

She tried to speak but the words forming in her mind made her sick and she waited through a tangy wave of nausea. “Jasper Grue,” she said. “My killer in Last Words.”

Chapter 16

Dr. Rosen hurried away from the door. “Jasper Grue — he was out in that barn?”

“It was Bert and Rita,” said Rebecca, starting to cry. “Bert and Rita.”

“Okay,” said Tom Duggan, approaching her slowly. He helped her up off the floor with a hand to her arm and got her into a chair. “How are you so certain it’s Grue?”

“Because I know him!”

Polk said, “Who is Grue?”

Tom Duggan explained, “Some sort of serial killer, if I recall. Ms. Loden writes thriller books. Her villain was Jasper Grue.”

“Inspired by,” she said. “Inspired by Jasper Grue. And he’s not a serial.” She tried to collect herself. “The Achilles tendon. Grue cuts them with bolt cutters to cripple his captives so they can’t run. Kills them by cutting their throats.”

“He was here?” said Dr. Rosen.

“He is here.” She pointed, aware that she was yelling. “He’s out there.”

“Then why haven’t they come after us?”

“He won’t be with the other prisoners,” said Rebecca, shaking her head. “He’s on his own.”

“On his own?”

The questions were good, they kept her from hysteria. “Trait’s black. Grue would never trust him.”

Tom Duggan said, “But how did he find us?”

It came to Rebecca right then. “He followed us from the country club. He followed us last night.”

Polk pointed upstairs. “You said Kells said no one could follow.”

“Right — no one except Grue. He’s a survivalist, an expert tracker. A hunter. He was raised on nature. Never uses a gun, doesn’t trust them. He likes the knife because it’s personal. Also crossbows, but he prefers hunting knives with serrated edges. He likes to do it face-to-face, talking you through. He collects last words. That’s what it’s all about. Used to keep them in a notebook, that was the main piece of evidence at his trial. And, if he has time, he pulls teeth for trophies. Makes jewelry out of them. Bragged to the press that he’d make a tiara out of me if he ever got the chance—”

“Easy,” said Tom Duggan. “Easy.”

“Last night before we left the country club — I thought I saw someone outside. He saw me there. He had picked up one of the fliers around town, checked the date, and stayed for me. The sound of the snowmobiles must have drawn him, same as the Cubans. Bert and Rita came across him and he killed them and carried them all that way. He brought them one by one into the barn. He set them up in there and put that flier in Bert’s mouth so that I would know he’s here for me. What Kells did for Inkman at the country club: My God, it’s the same thing. Grue is coming after me.”

“After you?” said Dr. Rosen. “Only you?”

“Weather doesn’t matter to him, snow, cold, nothing. He’ll wait me out. He’ll be as patient as the snow.”

Turning, she saw Mia standing behind her, looking like a child who happened upon something she was not meant to see. Her gaze quieted Rebecca.

In the ensuing silence, Rebecca heard a far-off sled engine.

“Kells,” said Tom Duggan.

Great relief from the others, and Rebecca jumped to her feet.

Then Dr. Rosen said, “But what if Grue is waiting for him?”

They rushed upstairs to try to signal Kells. Rebecca followed Tom Duggan to the master bedroom — strewn with clothes and chewed-up pet toys — with the others behind.

She could just make out the sled riding toward them over the white landscape — just the one sled, carrying two men. Moments later she was certain those were Coe’s jacket sleeves at the handlebars.

Polk joined them, out of breath from climbing the stairs. By then Rebecca was positive: It was Kells behind Coe, same body type, same jacket. “How do we signal them?”

Tom Duggan looked for a way to open the window as Dr. Rosen began to recoil. “Oh, no,” Dr. Rosen said, pointing. “Oh, no.”

Rebecca saw nothing at first. Kells and Coe were five hundred yards from the house, moving straight.

Then she noticed the dark shapes appearing off to the left. Two more sleds, running side-by-side.

“Found us,” said Polk.

A low rise separated the sleds from Kells and Coe, shielding them from view. But both parties were running like arrows converging on a point.

The prisoners’ sleds moved steadily through the snow, without great speed, each carrying a pair of cons. “They haven’t seen each other yet,” said Tom Duggan. “Kells doesn’t see them.”

The glass was fogging. Rebecca pressed her fists against the cold pane.

The prisoners’ sleds disappeared behind the last rise, then reemerged, first one and then the other, cresting the top and slowing at the head of the downslope.

They had spotted Kells and Coe moving below them.

“No,” said Dr. Rosen, behind them.

Coe saw them now. He was slowing. His sled came to a stop halfway across the rolling fields, still a few hundred yards away.

The two animals spied one another across the frozen plain. For a moment everything was still except the falling snow.

She knew that Kells was judging their chances of making it to the house. She watched with blazing attention. He never looked at the house. He was deciding whether or not he needed to involve the rest of them.

Black spots appeared on the snow at his sides, his shed gloves. He raised his rifle as Coe dug into the snow, wheeling the sled around and shooting off in the opposite direction.

Kells fired to his left. Four or five muffled reports. Coe cut sharply at an angle, running back toward the trees.

The cons’ sleds plowed down the bluff, gaining speed at the bottom, leaving two sets of grooves in the clean white frosting.

“He’s leaving us,” said Dr. Rosen.

Tom Duggan said tensely, “He’s leading them away.”

One sled took the lead, its passenger rising and leaning on the driver, firing.

Kells returned fire behind him, then tossed away the empty rifle and pulled a smaller gun as Coe made for the woods. They were fading from view now, disappearing into the trees.

Rebecca pushed away from the window. “What do we do?” she said. “Do we wait? Do we help?”

“Look!” cried Mia.

One of the prisoners’ sleds turned back. It had left the chase, following Coe’s tracks back toward the house.

“They figured it out,” said Tom Duggan.

The sled stopped at Coe’s turnaround. One of the helmeted prisoners pointed up at the house like he was pointing right at their window. Then they left Coe’s tracks and headed for the front yard.

Polk was already limping toward the stairs.

“Everybody take a window,” said Tom Duggan nervously, rushing after Polk. “We can’t let them in.”

Mia was still staring out the window. Rebecca took her arm and brought her across the hall to the other front-facing bedroom, the pink-painted nursery. “You need a gun,” said Rebecca.

Instead, Mia found a narrow recess between the changing table and a closet that fit her perfectly.

Rebecca stripped the gauzy cloud curtains from their rods. She peered around the edge of the window, watching the sled ease into the yard below. The land was broad and uneven, spaced by bare, snow-crusted oaks and clusters of gnarly birches. The prisoners drove slowly, cautiously.

Rebecca backed up. Across the hall, she could see Dr. Rosen on his knees before the picture window in the bedroom. He was talking to himself, gun in hand.

Mia gripped the changing table near a short stack of onesies. “Rebecca?” she said.

Rebecca returned to the side of the window. “What?”

“I’m pregnant.”

It was a long moment before Rebecca turned to look at her. Mia stood sad-eyed, trembling. The rumble of the snowmobile turned Rebecca back to the window.

“Just stay by the wall,” Rebecca said.

Below, the sled stopped and the prisoners climbed off holding their helmets. One carrying a compact, Uzi-like weapon, the other a handgun. The one with the Uzi spoke into a police radio. It was only a matter of time now. The snow in the front yard was unblemished, but once they went around back it was all over.

Then a gunshot below, a crack of breaking glass. It must have been Polk below her. The cons dropped their helmets, scattering, each to a separate cluster of trees. The trunks shielded them well and only a shoulder or a tuft of hair showed against the snow.

Rebecca was trying to raise her storm window when the rat-a-tat sound started, matched by a thumping noise. The prisoner to the right sprayed the house with automatic fire. The stream lashed at her window, lingering there, ten or twelve holes smacking through the double glass as Rebecca ducked away and the rounds lodged in the ceiling, chipping plaster and spinning a Winnie-the-Pooh mobile.

The bedtime tune jingled along with Mia’s screaming.

Rebecca blindly fired back twice through the cracked window. It felt scary, random, and futile. Not daring like it looked on TV.

The bullets had not pierced the walls of the house. Mia sank to the floor.

More answering gunfire from below — a slight response to the cons’ barrage — then just the plinking lullaby.

Convict reinforcements would be on their way by now. Rebecca scanned the horizon for Kells, but it was hopeless. His sled tracks were already fading in the swirling snow.

Mia was sitting on the floor with her hands blocking her ears. “Get out of here,” said Rebecca. “Find someplace to hide.”

Mia heard her through her hands. “I want to stay with you.”

Rebecca was shaking. “You hide. They’re going to kill the rest of us.”

Another spray of gunfire and glass cracked and fell to the braided rug. Mia got on all fours and crawled out of the room.

Rebecca aimed through a wide break in the double glass, firing one quick shot at each cluster of trees. She was turning away in anticipation of another barrage when something caught her eye.

Something was moving in the snow. It looked as though the snow itself were moving, something rippling beneath its surface like a worm beneath the skin — to the left of the nest of trees hiding the semiautomatic gun. Rebecca risked another long look and saw a patch of snow creeping along the front yard. A stray shot spat through the glass and Rebecca flinched but could not turn away. She was transfixed. The shape moved behind the trees.

The prisoner reared up with the small Uzi-like weapon in his hands and then something else reared up behind him. Two white arms wrapped the con’s chest and yanked him backward, the gun wasting rounds into the highest branches. The snow form rolled on top of the convict and a bright metal blade flashed.

At first she thought it was Kells. The figure turned on all fours and glanced up momentarily at the house, and Rebecca saw small, dark eyes, a bleached-white coat, and a bloody knife blade. The thrill of victory dropped away.

It was Jasper Grue. He released the dead convict and returned to the blankness of the snow.

The moment possessed the awful inevitability of a dream. She understood now that she was his to hunt and no one else’s.

The other con rose hesitantly, eyeing the other cluster of trees. He had heard the automatic fire. He saw the ripped branches and snow clumps falling down. He was calling his partner’s name.

Footsteps on the hall stairs. A voice, Tom Duggan’s. “Let’s go! Let’s go!”

She ran to the top step, and for a moment the staircase was all white, her eyes stinging with the brightness of the early morning snow. Tom Duggan materialized at the bottom and she hurried down.

“You saw him?” she said.

He nodded. “We have to get away while they fight it out. Now or never.”

Mia was there and they grabbed their things in a frenzy, Rebecca throwing her computer case over her shoulder as another gunshot cracked outside. She hurried to the kitchen and Polk was sitting on a chair near the door. He appeared oddly relaxed. Rebecca yelled at him, “Come on!”

Dr. Rosen entered from the bathroom with a roll of gauze and a handful of Muppet bandages. He knelt next to Polk and Rebecca stopped and took a closer look at the old man.

She saw the bloodstain on his shirt, spreading over the lower left side of his gut.

“Damned lucky shot,” he said, wincing with disappointment.

Dr. Rosen was frantic. “This won’t work. I need real medical supplies.”

Tom Duggan rushed in. “Where?”

“A hospital, a clinic. A doctor’s office.”

Tom Duggan shook his head. “Nearest hospital’s in Beckett.”

Rebecca said, “What about an animal hospital?”

“There’s the vet. Dr. Chalbee.”

Dr. Rosen nodded quickly. “We should go there.”

Tom Duggan said, “I know the way.”

He buttoned Polk’s jacket over the wound and helped him to his feet. Outside, he loaded the old man onto a sled and sat in front.

Rebecca mounted the other two-man sled as Mia stood by. “Get on!” yelled Rebecca, and Mia did, clasping her hands around Rebecca’s waist. Dr. Rosen took the one-man sled and they pulled out after Tom Duggan.

They rounded the house the long way, riding in tandem along the tree line. Mia’s hug tightened as they crossed into the front yard.

Grue was working over the prisoner in the second clutch of trees. The sled noise turned his head. Rebecca opened up her throttle. She wanted as much distance between her and Jasper Grue as possible. She crouched closer to the handlebars and Mia gripped her tight, the laptop pressed between them as they raced across the yard to the field beyond, gathering speed.

She looked back once. Grue was distinct against the dark trees, watching them go, the second convict lying dead at his feet. She saw something in Grue’s hands: a hunting bow. He was in no rush. The town was a trap and Rebecca’s sled tracks left a long thin shadow she would not outrun.

Chapter 17

Coe danced the two-man sled along a Hunter’s path through the crowded wood.

The kid obeyed every instruction Kells yelled into his helmet. He held on to Coe’s midsection with one hand, reaching back to fire with the other. But Kells could not get off a clear shot, even as bursts of gunfire chipped the tree trunks around them.

They jumped free of the tree cover, hopping a curb of snow onto a meadow road, the rear track fishtailing until the treads bit and the sled straightened out. The road was clear and rising and Coe surfed it hard. The cons’ sled broke out of the trees and Kells aimed for the headlight. He noted that the second sled did not follow.

Coe topped the incline and the land up ahead opened around them, too widely. They would be an easy target there. The kid was driving for the lower hills where the road rejoined the trees, but they weren’t going to make it. Kells heard cracks over the growl of the sled engine, then a sound like a rock striking his helmet. He saw the cons’ sled in the shaky side-view mirror, two road dips behind them and closing.

Then the view in the mirror went white. Coe had peeled off the road in a wild, skidding turn, nearly tossing an unprepared Kells, hurtling them down the steep face of a bluff. Kells’s stomach floated as they dipped, coming up short and hard at the bottom. The other sled followed them off the road, gaining over the slower track, firing. Snow chunks popped around them like white corks. They rejoined the winding road on the far side and hit another straightaway and Coe got them back up to speed. But the sled behind them was still gaining. Kells turned and fired three more shots, to no real effect.

The cons were closing the gap on their left wing. They were within shooting range but the kid kept his head down and pushed the sled. Kells turned to fire. He saw the rear passenger on the con sled fooling with his Micro Uzi, trying to reload and hold on at that speed.

Kells barked an order into Coe’s ear and the kid braked obediently, immediately, fishtailing a bit as the cons’ sled burst ahead, coming even with them suddenly, not more than an arm’s length away. Kells looked over at the surprised criminals, the con in back working frantically to reload.

Kells’s revolver was in his left hand now. He fired at the sled, picking holes in its side and biting the driver’s leg, who twisted away. The sled began to wobble. The con driver was losing the skid and the sled ran nose-first into the far shoulder of the road, momentum carrying the machine and its passengers cartwheeling away.

Coe pulled to a stop and Kells jumped off and ran fifty yards back to the cons. The passenger was dead. His neck was wrenched at an impossible angle, his body crumpled at the base of a tree. The driver lay on his stomach, half-buried in the snow, moaning.

Kells dug the man out and rolled him over. He pulled off the con’s helmet and tossed it into the snow. It was a white guy in his early thirties, still reaching for his bloody thigh. The gun in his face did nothing to ease his grimace. The con cursed in pain and rage.

Kells unzipped the man’s coat and found a police radio on his belt.

Kells told him, “Say what I tell you to say.”

The man cursed and gripped his leg, trying to look at his wounds.

Kells kneeled on the man’s chest, pressing the muzzle of his Astra .357 against the con’s Adam’s apple. “Say what I tell you to say or I’ll kill you.”

The man was settling down, breathing through bared teeth.

“Give them your handle,” Kells said. He turned on the transmitter with his free hand and held it to the man’s mouth.

“Dog Two,” said the con, his eyes fierce on Kells.

“Dog Two, come in, over.”

Kells told him what to say and the con’s voice was strained as he repeated it into the radio. “Clock is running,” he said.

“Again, Dog Two?”

Kells nodded and the man repeated himself. “Clock is running.”

Kells shot the man twice, two rounds into the meat of his opposite thigh.

Kells stood and turned off the radio, tossing it into the snow, leaving the con screaming.

At the sled, Coe pulled off his helmet with some difficulty and held it in his trembling hands as though it were his head. There was a chip in the black enamel. A bullet had glanced his right ear. Kells’s gunshots shook him and he dropped the helmet to the snow. He saw Kells standing over one of the prisoner’s bodies with his gun in his hand, and all at once the chase, the killers, the bullets, the takeover — everything caught up with him and Coe vomited, forcefully voiding the bile from his stomach, sinking weakly to his knees on the side of the road.

Chapter 18

“ ‘Clock is running,’ ” said Inkman, pacing the dining room. His hands squirmed behind his back. He wore a guard’s flak jacket now, obvious beneath his soft wool sweater, barreling his thin torso.

Trait found Inkman’s veneration of Clock offensive.

“I told you not to go after him,” said Inkman.

Gunfire popped again, muffled and distant. The four surviving Marielitos were performing a Santeria ritual over their countrymen’s remains in the funeral home. Menckley had seen them smearing ashes on the foreheads of the dead and placing empty bottles of rum into their stiff hands, waving guns and occasionally firing into the walls.

Trait let them grieve. The ammunition they wasted was a modest investment in vengeance. He was glad he had not sent any of them to be lost with the morning patrol.

“What if he starts to get to the others, shaking them up?” continued Inkman. “You can’t have them questioning your judgment.”

Trait said contemptuously, “So far you are the only one doing that.”

At the northern barricade before dawn, a riderless snowmobile had crashed into the tractors and combines blocking the road, bursting into flames. It did no significant damage, but sniper fire dropped three of the four watchmen who tried to put out the blaze.

An hour later, the two-sled search patrol reported engine noise in the northeast. They sighted the sled, one taking pursuit, the other continuing ahead taking fire from a nearby farmhouse. Trait sent Menckley to alert the Marielitos, but then received the “Clock” transmission from Dog Two and called him back. There had been no more radio reports.

Trait pulled his concerns inward while Inkman paced and talked.

“We use the ricin leverage here,” Inkman suggested. “Demand the insurgents’ surrender. Tell Clock and the rest to back off or else we take out a town.”

Incoherence. “You keep going on about how coldblooded he is. Wouldn’t holding a town over his head only increase his resolve?”

“We threaten the government, then. Have them call him off.”

“And show weakness? This is an internal problem.”

“No — it would show strength. The threat would reinforce our superiority.”

“This is cowardice,” insisted Trait. “Are we a nation of warriors, or a gang of cheap extortionists?” Inkman’s increasing desperation had eroded Trait’s patience. “Clock is a distraction, nothing more. The only thing we can threaten him with is failure.”

“Don’t turn this into a contest,” said Inkman. “If you get into a tug-of-war with him—”

“What? I’ll lose?”

Inkman closed his mouth and looked away.

Trait simmered under Inkman’s impudence. He had to remind himself that Inkman had delivered him from Gilchrist and that the future of the town depended in part on his expertise. That was the only thing stopping Trait from beating Inkman to death right there in the dining room.

The black cat peeked out again from beneath the saloon doors of the kitchen. It eyed Trait and shrank back, fur rising as it turned and trotted archly away.

Menckley came when Trait called him, massaging ointment into his scarred hands. It had been Menckley’s job to dispose of the cat.

“She’s too quick,” said Menckley. “I don’t know what to do.”

“You trap her the same way we’re going to trap these rebels — by setting out a nice big bowl of milk.”

A thirteen inch television atop a file cabinet in front of the holding cell showed the dying, blood-vomiting cons. Trait sat on the cushioned swivel chair from the police chief’s office, watching Warden Barton James through the door. The warden’s back sagged and his hands gripped the edge of the plastic bed, his arms lax. Trait had issued him a clean T-shirt and the warden had used his button-up Arrow to clean the dried blood off his face. His right eye was misshapen and dark but his jaw was less twisted.

The warden’s unlaced shoes were twinned on the floor beneath the hard bed. They had also confiscated his belt. Around his waist instead was the thick black nylon stun belt that Trait once wore. Trait sat with the remote electronic trigger in his hand.

Trait had given the warden a copy of his own obituary, downloaded from a Denver newspaper that morning. Barton James, thirty-seven-year employee of the Federal Bureau of Prisons, left a wife in Colorado and two married daughters.

“Four inches of newsprint,” said Trait. “And only because you were murdered by someone famous like me.”

The warden shifted uncomfortably on the bench, rolling his head away from the television. If he was thinking about his wife and children now, he was too smart to let it show.

“There are other riots now,” Trait went on. “Terre Haute, Fort Dix. Otisville, Millington, Terminal Island. The BOP came down hard with a nationwide lockdown, but a little too late. It’s spreading. We’ve shown them it can be done, and done with style. The news opinion polls are asking, ‘What do you think the government should do about the prisoners occupying Gilchrist?’ And guess what the American public is saying?”

“They are saying, ‘Leave them alone.’ ”

“Same as always. ‘Bury them. Forget. Do whatever you have to, we don’t want to know.’ And you were their man. And now they are abandoning you.”

“They believe I am dead.”

“And you are dead. As I was. Welcome to your afterlife. Here you will answer for your prison. I spent five years talking to walls that would not talk back. Now I will have some satisfaction.” He pointed to the television. “Why didn’t you just kill us? Why didn’t you end it as I have? You call it humane, you say, We are not evil because we do not kill evil men. So you torture us instead. We were your whipping boys.”

“You were being punished for your crimes—”

“We were being punished for the country’s crimes. We were someone they could point to. We were there for them. My name strikes fear and awe into peoples’ hearts, like that of a god. All you did was imprison that god for a while. My crimes gave you whatever power you had. Gilchrist was my prison, not yours.”

“And that is why I am being punished?”

“For failing to recognize that. But unlike you, I have no interest in torture. All I want to do is talk.”

“That’s what most cons want. To be heard.” Trait nodded. “To cry on the shoulder of a society that never loved them. But not me. I don’t need your society. Man is the most resourceful creature on this earth — the greatest hunter, the greatest survivor — and I am the very best of that breed. Too great even for my own time, for this thin veil of civilization the world has drawn over its face. Man’s primal impulses — to take for himself, to fight, to own — I have answered here. Your society hasn’t cast me out. I have cast out your society.”

“Then why me?”

“Because you are the prison. I have taken my prison, the external walls and bars, and imprisoned it, internalized it. I have mastered it.”

“Mentally, you’re still there. Is that what you’re saying?”

“Don’t try to crawl inside my head. There’s no room for you there.”

“This can’t last, Luther. You can’t win, not here.”

“Your naivete is showing — your belief in freedom, in safety, in peace. In this place called America. The only thing that keeps America going is exactly your illusion of America, this myth of sanctity, this adolescent dream. A pyramid scheme of better tomorrows. The myth that they can leave the dark side of their culture in the care of others, that it has been segregated and controlled. ‘Bury them. Forget.’ Like their garbage and their ghettos. We have already won. We will be left alone here.”

“But there is a resistance effort in town.”

Trait held his poise, pleased he had kept the warden alive. “You have overheard things,” he said. “Good. We’ll have no secrets from each other.”

Trait told him everything then, from Inkman to Clock. He saved mention of the writer for last.

“You are as surprised as I was,” said Trait.

The warden looked shocked. “What do you want with her?” he said.

Trait had lost all sense of Rebecca Loden as an actual person. In his mind she was the daughter of his foster family, the one who had caused all the trouble.

Trait said, “I think the question is: What does she want with me?”

Chapter 19

The snow-topped, hand-painted shingle hung from a black yard lamp, Pet’s Best Friend, Mending and Grooming, Dr. Roke Chalbee. The house behind it was an untidy ranch tucked away from the road with a novelty street sign posted over the carport: Ford Cars Only. Snowfall humped the shrubs in front so that from a distance the house looked like it was sinking in a bowl of meringue. A sore-thumb addition off one side of the house was the veterinarian’s office.

They paged Kells as soon as they arrived. He and Coe were all right. They told him what had happened at the farmhouse, about Polk and Grue, and Kells was on his way back with Coe.

Rebecca wandered from room to room with the Beretta still in her coat pocket. It would take Grue perhaps a full day to track them on foot. He had never even operated a motor vehicle and would not follow by sled. He mistrusted most machines, although there was evidence he had used a chain saw once, and wiretap records once captured his voice on the telephone. It had once seemed fitting that he would serve out his sentence trapped inside the technological fortress of ADX Gilchrist.

In the office, Polk sat next to a small steel examining table with his shirt unbuttoned. Dr. Rosen snipped away his stained T-shirt to expose his pale, protuberant gut and downturned nipples. The bandage, as it came away, was soaked with blood. Dr. Rosen cleaned the wound until it looked benign, a neat little tear in the soft handle of the old man’s lower right side, bleeding feebly.

Dogs howled behind the door leading to the kennel.

Dr. Rosen asked Polk over the din, “How’s it feel?”

The old man was ashen-faced, breathing deeply. “Oh,” he said, “not bad.”

“Numbness anywhere? Tingling? Legs moving all right?”

“Legs fine.”

“No pain, walking?”

“Put some music on, I’ll dance.”

Dr. Rosen patted his shoulder and moved to a medicine cabinet over the sink. Tom Duggan had broken the lock.

“Look at poor Tommy,” said Polk. Tom Duggan was standing in the doorway with his arms crossed. “He’s all bothered about his commission.”

Tom Duggan said, “You shouldn’t have shot at them so early.”

“Don’t measure me just yet, box maker. This is a scratch.”

Rebecca joined Dr. Rosen while the others bickered. “He’s lying about the pain,” said Dr. Rosen, selecting a glass bottle. “I’m going to give him an animal sedative. It’ll have to do.”

“What about the dogs?” she said. Their barking was like an alarm.

Dr. Rosen nodded unhappily. “The same, I guess.”

“I want you to take a look at Mia when you’re through here.”

“Why?” he said. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing. Just look her over, make sure she’s okay.”

Polk saw Dr. Rosen with the glass bottle in hand. “No putting me out,” said Polk. “You people need me awake.”

Dr. Rosen filled a syringe. “Some rest will do you good.”

Polk tried to stand as Dr. Rosen approached. “Don’t come at me with that,” he said.

“Your heart rate is way up. You’re wasting recuperative energy on yelling at everybody. You need to sleep.”

“Come at me with that thing,” Polk said, “and you’ll get a fight.”

Dr. Rosen stopped, needle in hand, unsure how to proceed. Tom Duggan came forward from the door. “Tell me where,” he said.

“The muscle,” said Dr. Rosen. “Anywhere.”

Tom Duggan took the syringe and faced Polk. The old man’s breathing was rapid now, blood pushing more quickly out of the tear in his side. “You need rest,” said Tom Duggan.

Polk grinned, half out of his chair. “Cadavers ever fight back, Tommy?”

Tom Duggan advanced and the old man’s arm came up. Tom Duggan grasped Polk’s wrist and twisted his arm, jabbing the needle into the man’s sagging biceps. He held him there as he emptied the barrel, then released Polk, and handed the syringe needle back to Dr. Rosen.

Polk snickered, rubbing his wrist. He looked angrily dazed. “Bet that felt good, eh, Tommy? Why don’t you take it out on me, your mother’s death. It’s your prison.” He slumped back in the chair. “She came into the post office. A cape coat she wore. Package for Tommy. From the Lionel Train company, for Tommy’s birthday.” He stared off as Tom Duggan left the room. “For Tommy’s birthday.”

Rebecca helped Dr. Rosen walk the tired, mumbling old man down the hall to the bedroom. They lay him on top of the comforter with a pillow under his legs, untucking the edges of the blanket and sheets and folding them over him. They left him wrapped tight and mumbling about Lionel Trains and overdue postage.

Rebecca returned with Dr. Rosen to the kennel. The vet had left behind three small, yipping dogs, a clumsy Newfoundland woofing in the biggest cage, and a handful of cats lounging in a carpet-lined habitat, scratching and mewling. They dosed the noisy animals’ food, and in fifteen minutes there was quiet in the house, except the Newfoundland’s snoring and the twenty-four-hour news.

The TV room blended with the decor of the rest of the house, that of the aging bachelor pad. There was a thin-cushioned den couch squared off in front of the dusty set, a stack of blank videocassettes and Sports Illustrated magazines on the crumb-covered coffee table, beer label coasters, a food-stained remote control.

The news ran footage of American servicemen camping in the Vermont snow. Eleven thousand United States Army and National Guard personnel surrounded Gilchrist. A report on “small-town paranoia,” recounted the flight to larger population centers across the country and reports of vigilante gangs roaming rural towns, looking for outsiders.

There was much more, such as the stock market, down nineteen percent since the takeover — but the usually news-hungry Rebecca did not care. Reason played no role in her vigilance as she returned to pacing the long central hallway, watching the windows for Grue. She made a detour later into the back room of slumbering animals, coming upon Mia. She had her short-nailed finger inside the wire wall of the cat cage, rubbing a kitten’s velvety snout.

Rebecca went to her, watching her baby the sleeping kitten. “Fern had a cat,” said Rebecca, remembering.

She saw suddenly how empty her life had been over the past year. How she had been hiding in Vermont, nursing her wounds — pretending to get stronger, but in truth just hiding. Polk’s secession from Gilchrist seemed reasonable to her now. He had abandoned his hometown before it could abandon him. She hadn’t walked away from Manhattan so much as she had declared war on it, the Manhattan that had once been her and Jeb’s. The Gilchrist that had once been Polk’s.

Mia withdrew her finger from the cage. “Do you think you’ll ever write about this?” she said.

The notebook computer Rebecca was lugging around everywhere with her. The novel gestating inside. The writing life seemed so far away now.

Rebecca shrugged. “Do you think I’ll ever get the chance?”

She later checked on polk at the other end of the house. Swathed in sheets and blankets, unshaven, his hair mussed and his aged skin grubby, he could have been wrapped in mover’s quilts in a doorway off Lexington Avenue. They were all homeless now.

There was a portable telephone next to a packet of Jokers on the dresser. A cartoon dog eraser capped the antenna. Rebecca could have called Jeb again, but what was the point? In theory, she could imagine the relief of hearing a familiar voice. Just not his.

Rebecca got her case and set up her laptop on the table desk inside the vet’s office. She risked tying up the phone line for a few minutes and fed her modem wire into the wall socket. Her America Online account came up and she signed on.

The front page headline hyperlink read:

She went to Google and typed in “Errol Inkman.” The returned list of newspaper headlines told the story:

And so on. She pursued it no further. Instead, she searched Kells, realizing she did not know his first name.

She scrolled through such random sites as the homepage for a Boston bar and a gamer’s favorite death-match foes. Tenth on the list of ten returns was a year-old article from the New York Post, but the link only gave her the first few paragraphs:

That was why he had not contacted his superiors. Alex Kells was the last person the government wanted running loose inside Gilchrist.

She signed off her account and unplugged her modem. Just then the task of packing up her computer seemed too daunting. Instead, she pointed her cursor at her novel-in-progress and the document scrolled onto her screen. She scanned the first few sentences. They thudded like notes banged out on an old piano. She switched off the computer before upsetting herself any further. Too exhausted to sleep, she lay her head down on her crossed arms anyway.

The subway station was crowded with prisoners dressed as prison guards. Rebecca stood among them, still and tense. A train pulled up and all the doors opened and Kells stepped off wearing a three-piece suit. The cons all watched him in a complicit manner but no one said a word.

Kells approached her. Rebecca waited to catch his eye but he passed without a glance.

A parcel he left on the subway car started to sizzle. Smoke began to flow out of the sliding doors, becoming snow that fell inside the subway station, piling up on the platform. The snow was deadly poisonous and the disguised prisoners ran for the turnstiles while Rebecca stood there cradling her laptop, open and swaddled in a blanket of soft pink chenille. The infant’s face on the screen blinked and smiled at her, then began to cry. Its wailing turned heads. Jeb rushed over, dressed as the prison warden, trying to wrest the laptop from her arms. Rebecca fought him off until he became Jasper Grue. The laptop screamed and wriggled in her arms as she ran through the poisoned snow to the turnstiles, where Luther Trait was waiting to take her ticket. You have something for me, he said.

She awoke from the dream — back in her bed at the inn. The quilt comforter was warm and heavy on her chest and legs. It was night still, and the relief Rebecca felt was immeasurable. It all fell quickly into place: the prison interview, the evening snow, meeting the inn guests, sleuthing around after the mysterious Mr. Kells. She was fascinated by the way her unconscious mind had sorted these things into the fantasia of a prison riot and the takeover of the town, and meant to think on it some more. She reached for a glass of water on the night table, and that was when she saw the man watching her from the foot of her bed. He came at her out of the shadows with incredible speed.

she awoke in the vet’s office with a grunt and the squeak of the chair. She looked about, confused that she had dozed, then greatly disappointed not to be in her bed at the inn.

She felt a cold draft, as though somewhere in the house a door had been opened. She heard voices and stood at once, following them down the hall to the pantry.

Everyone was at the open back door. Two men were walking out of the trees. The larger one, Kells, wore a black ski mask and carried a large camouflage bag slung over his back. Coe trudged a step or two behind.

Inside, Kells pulled off his mask with a crackle of static. Coe’s cheeks and chin were windblown red, his eyes bleary. They stood in the kitchen, emanating cold, stamping their feet.

Tom Duggan said, “Where are the sleds?”

Kells’s mask had left his jaw muscles warm enough for speech. “Ditched them. Too noisy. More trouble than they’re worth. We have something better.”

He slid the camouflage bag off his back to the linoleum floor, its contents clattering, bulging strangely. He left it there, too stiff from cold to kneel, so Dr. Rosen got down on the floor and unzipped the bag.

“Snowshoes,” said Kells.

Not the old wood-and-rawhide kind, but modern aluminum frames with waterproof decking and step-in bindings and toe crampons. There were three pairs. Underneath was other gear for winter trekking: ankle gaiters, full-boot crampons, thermoses, an ice axe. And one of the strapped Micro Uzis favored by the prisoners.

“A hunter’s lodge,” he said. “Where we called you from. They had taken the guns.” He frowned at the last part. “Where’s Polk?”

Dr. Rosen led him into the bedroom. Rebecca remained in the kitchen, a little shocked. She thought her situation with Grue merited immediate concern.

They helped Coe into the TV room and onto the couch, pulling off his jacket and his boots. Mia draped a red-and-black throw over him, and Coe swallowed and worked at loosening up his facial muscles as they questioned him.

In broken sentences, he recounted Kells’s sniper work at the northern barricade, then the snowmobile chase from the farmhouse. “He shot them,” Coe said, and Rebecca was unable to tell if this excited or disgusted him. Perhaps both.

He let his head fall back against the top of the threadbare cushion. He described the hunter’s lodge on the shore of the frozen lake, then was relating Kells’s 911 call when his voice began to trail away. His eyes were closing and none of them tried to rouse him. His head slipped to the side and he looked so young asleep. Rebecca tucked the throw around him.

Kells returned, having shed his coat. “Good,” he said, seeing Coe sleeping. He dropped into an easy chair himself, the armrests worn to strings at the elbows.

“You called nine one one?” asked Tom Duggan.

“To draw them out there. Keep them off balance, expend more of their energy. We torched the place before we left.” Dr. Rosen entered, returning from the bedroom. “Can you go after the bullet?”

“Without a transfusion, that would only do more damage. I don’t think it hit any organs.”

“Who thought to bring him here to a vet?”

Dr. Rosen said, “Ms. Loden.”

Kells looked at her, nodding, impressed. “So tell me about Grue.”

Where to start? She told him about Bert and, Rita, then about having seen someone in the trees at the country club. At the end she handed Kells the library flier.

He nodded, yawning. “This definitely complicates things.”

Rebecca stared. “Complicates things?”

“How accurate was your portrayal of him in the book?”

“I didn’t portray him. The character was based on Jasper Grue.”

“So you made him a little worse than he really was. But other than that, it was him. The thing about collecting last words?”

“That was him.”

“And his tracking abilities?”

“He bleached his coat and pants to blend in with the snow. The cons never saw him coming.”

“Bleach.” Kells nodded again. “That’s good, we should have thought of that. Never fired a gun?”

“Right.”

“Won’t use a sled.”

“Yes.”

“Stalking, rape.”

“Yes.”

“Okay. So he’s on foot, and by all accounts still hours away.”

“But he’ll get here. And if we move before that he’ll follow us again. He’s used to living off the land. That’s what made it so difficult for the FBI. Before his capture, he hadn’t slept with a roof over his head since age six. He could survive out there indefinitely.”

Kells yawned again. He pulled at some of the armrest strings, thinking. “Do you want my advice?”

“Yes — of course.”

“I would kill him.”

“Oh. I see, thanks. Knew you’d come up with something.”

“There are no restraining orders in Gilchrist, no police to call. He knows we’re armed so he’ll hang back awhile, because this is playtime for him. But you can’t just wait him out. You can’t hide and you can’t run away.”

“I was hoping you might help me.”

“Me? I’m waging a guerilla war here. Kind of have my plate full.”

She stared at him, unbelieving. “So what am I supposed to do?”

“What you need to do. Survival has a way of uniquely focusing the mind.”

That last sentence stuck Rebecca and she rolled it over and over in her head. “Survival...”

“ ‘Survival has a way of uniquely focusing the mind.’ I read your book. That line was one of the few truthful things in there. You have a mind for crime, but there’s distance in your fiction, a shallowness, a dishonesty. You’re better than that. Some of the things you wrote, the throwaways, the minor insights into the criminal mind. You’re intrigued by criminals and bad men, but you dress up this interest as entertainment. You’re hiding behind your prose.”

Here, finally, was the foreman of her existential jury. “Are you a killer or a book critic?” she said.

“I know you think it’s a mistake you’re here. Wrong place, wrong time. But there are no mistakes, only choices. Choices you’ve dreamed about in order to avoid actually making.”

Rebecca was too stunned to be offended. Did he have to do this in front of the others? “You think you know me because you read my book?”

“You took a criminal and dressed him up as a bogeyman for your fictional counterpart to slay. Now you’re stuck fighting your own ghost. He’s not interested in the rest of us except as impediments. You built him up, you’re going to have to tear him down again.”

Kells yawned again and settled deeper into the chair. “I have to check out for a few hours now,” he said. He turned to Tom Duggan. “The gas station, the one with the old-fashioned tanks. Is that the only one in town?”

Tom Duggan nodded. “Just the one,” he said.

“It’s outside the center of town. That makes it easy.” Kells crossed his arms snugly and put his head back. “Wake me at sundown. The three of us, the undertaker, the thriller writer, and the killer,” one last sideways glance at Rebecca before closing his eyes, “are going for a walk.”

Chapter 20

What she remembered most about their journey that night, three hours trekking on snowshoes through frozen backyards and deserted country roads, was the sound of the bird’s wings. In the windless snow-silence, Rebecca heard an eager flip flip flip as a woodpecker took flight, leaving one pine tree for another. The din of civilization had tricked her into believing that birds flew in silence.

It is a staple of science fiction that characters undergo “hyper-sleep” during space travel, their bodies working at a metabolic crawl in order to survive a voyage of thousands of light-years. That was how her mind was working now. Every hour spent in Gilchrist seemed to speed her farther away from her former existence, as though if she did not turn back soon, her home world would be forever lost.

The snow did not glow that night. The landscape stretched before them like deep space. She was soaked in blackness, as though imbued with invisibility. Kells was somewhere behind her, Tom Duggan a few steps in front. In the gloom it was like walking between two ghosts.

Only the eerie calm spared her total sensory deprivation. She concentrated on the sound of their snowshoe crampons chewing the snow crust.

Tom Duggan’s navigational skills impressed her. He went forward with determination, leading them out of the trees on the far side of a hill along a hump of snow that might have been a buried stone wall, joining what seemed to her an old logging road.

Snowshoeing had not come easily. Rebecca was just getting the hang of it when Tom Duggan stopped. She sensed him next to her, and they waited for Kells in the dark.

Kells’s bearpaws were undersized for his weight. He was huffing a bit, the outline of the shotgun barrel poking out of his backpack just visible. It occurred to her that he had not taken the smaller Uzi.

“Through these trees at the bottom,” whispered Tom Duggan.

Kells’s voice was disembodied, haunting. “Let’s go.”

A light shone faintly through the tree trunks. Kells led the way down the sloping wood until Rebecca made out the slowly rotating sign. IRVING, it read, between the top red half and bottom white half of a diamond. Below that: Quality Gasoline.

She saw a pair of old-fashioned pumps in front of a clapboard building, across a road scarred with sled tracks. It was almost a mystical scene, the snow falling around the lazy twirl of the illuminated sign. If ever a gas station could be described as being beautiful, this was it. Rebecca shrugged off her small pack and sat down behind a tree trunk to unstrap her snowshoes.

The only thing more miserable than shoeing through the snow was sitting in it. Light from the IRVING sign was spare, but it was the only torch in the night. The lonely gas station occupied one corner of a densely wooded intersection. A small house was just visible to the far right, shadowed and quiet. She made out more tread marks in the snow around the pumps, and a large, hand-lettered sign over the garage: No Car Foreign To Us. The building itself appeared abandoned, just like the rest of the town.

Perhaps “Enemy Fuel Supply and Storage Facilities” was at the top of me strategic objectives list in the standard CIA primer on civil insurrection. Rebecca had expected to be Kells’s lookout. Hanging back and observing was the perfect job for a writer. But when Kells donned his ski mask back on and started to move, both she and Tom Duggan followed. She did not want to be left behind.

Shotgun now in hand, Kells led them down through the rest of the trees, hunched low, continuing along the shoulder of the road until the station garage blocked their view of the pump island and the twirling light. They crossed the road there, some feeling returning to Rebecca’s legs as they reached the neighboring house. A shingle under the mailbox told her it was the home of the town taxidermist. From there they turned and doubled back through trees to the rear of the gas station.

They stopped at the tree edge. Fifteen or so feet of open space separated them from the building. Kells pointed out dim tracks in the snow along the rear wall, leading to a barely visible back door. They were boot prints and they were recent.

“Wait here,” Kells said, and started along the tree line, moving the long way around the station, treading lightly on the snow, disappearing around the right side of the station.

Rebecca looked at Tom Duggan. He wore his flannel hunting cap with the ear flaps down. He was scanning the trees behind them, nervous.

“What do you think?” she asked.

Smoke blew out of his mouth. “I think there’s someone here.”

Kells returned, moving tree to tree.

“Four of them inside,” he whispered.

Rebecca stared. She wanted so much more information, and none at all.

“They’re huddled around a space heater,” continued Kells. “Too cold to wait outside.”

“Wait for what?” she said.

“This trap.”

She was actually relieved. She looked back through the trees to the taxidermist’s house. Now they would retreat.

Kells pulled off his ski mask, eyeing the rear of the station. His head turned as though he were listening to something. He was not leaving.

“Listen,” he said.

There were too many thoughts going through her head to focus on any one thing. Her own breath came like a roar in the windless night.

She heard a click, crisp in the cold air. A door somewhere. Maybe low voices. Now the soft crunching of footsteps over hardened snow, advancing.

“Oh, my God,” she whispered.

Kells’s eyes worked quickly over the station as he handed her his shotgun. Rebecca took it and backed behind a wide tree trunk across from him. Tom Duggan also hid.

Kells stood still. She watched his eyes track the source of the footsteps as it rounded the corner of the garage. His eyes narrowed and brightened.

She heard a key being inserted, a knob being turned. A soft bumping noise and a door opening and closing.

Kells stepped from the side of the tree trunk. Steam came thickly out of his nose.

“Now do we go?” she said, panicked.

He held up his palm to silence her, then emerged from the tree cover to stand in full view of the closed door.

Rebecca hugged the long gun to her chest. “Don’t,” she said.

But he was already crossing the snow boundary to the light-rimmed bathroom door. The crunching of his boots was soft and quick, then silence ruled again. Rebecca could barely see him in the shadows against the station wall.

A soft flushing noise.

Rebecca could not take her eyes off Kells’s form. She could see him breathing deeply in some strange, meditative way.

The knob clicked. The door opened and the figure of a man emerged from the dark room. Rebecca saw him only briefly. There was something round and flat in his hands, keys hanging from it. A weapon was slung over his shoulder.

The man noticed the extra footprints, stark and violent over the crust of snow. He followed them back with his eyes to where Rebecca stood, reaching for his weapon as an arm appeared behind him.

Kells’s right hand cuffed the man’s throat. He pulled him down backward without a cry.

Rebecca turned quickly to the taxidermist’s house. She listened to the thumping struggle of one desperate man trying to overpower another. She wanted to run and keep running.

Tom Duggan watched the gas station with narrowed eyes, as though staring into a raging wind. Rebecca heard the snow being thrashed. She could not run and she could not stand still.

She looked back. She had to.

Kells’s knee was on the man’s chest. He had the strap of the man’s weapon wound around his neck, strangling him. The man’s legs were kicking slowly in the overturned snow.

It would not end. She turned and watched Tom Duggan instead, and eventually his expression relaxed. Then Kells rejoined them, carrying the man’s weapon.

“Now can we go?” she said. It was what she had been saying over and over in her mind.

Kells’s eyes were shining and there was sweat on his neck. “They’re going to come looking for him,” he said. “We’ll finish this here.”

He was pulling off his gloves. He unzipped Rebecca’s coat and she let him. She was wearing Polk’s old gun belt, notched tight, the excess strap tucked into her waistband. Kells pulled the Beretta out of her holster and stuffed it into the back of his pants. Then he took the shotgun from her. He emptied the rounds, dropping them into his pocket.

“Pull off your gloves,” he said.

“Why?”

“Pull off your gloves.”

She stepped back, one pace closer to the taxidermist’s house. “What are you doing?”

“I can’t take all three by myself. Not without firing.”

“Without... firing?”

“We’re too close to the center of town. The noise would carry. We’d be overrun in minutes.”

“But you said, ‘take all three’?”

“You’re coming with me to the garage. I can’t do this alone.”

“Why take a gun?”

“You can hold it on them. They won’t know you can’t shoot. Now pull off your gloves.”

“I’ll go,” offered Tom Duggan.

“No,” said Kells. “You wait here. Neither one of us will make it back without you.”

She was sick but the symptoms would not manifest themselves. “Don’t make me do this,” she said.

He was holding the shotgun out to her. He had that purposeful look in his face again, the killer standing in front of her.

“Think about Fern,” he said. “Remember what they did to her.”

Rebecca stopped protesting and Kells pulled off her gloves. He put the shotgun into her cold hands.

Kells started across to the corner of the back wall. With a glance back at Tom Duggan, Rebecca followed.

She was on the threshold of nausea, tipsy with violence and fear. The oppressive cold settled in her head, making her mind heavy. Something washed through Rebecca, a chill separate from the outside air, a bracing mania she had never before known. Her grip tightened on the slide handle of the unloaded weapon.

Attached to the corner of the wall was a small box bearing the old Ma Bell symbol. Kells opened it and plucked out the wires.

They carefully retraced the dead man’s footprints to the front. Kells peered around the corner, then started ahead. For a brief moment the IRVING light bathed them from above, and a shiver like a silent scream ripped through her body.

The bay door was slanted, half raised, as though jammed. They ducked inside and moved low, aware of a closed office door to their left. There was an old Volkswagen Rabbit, its dark green hood open, a greasy rag hanging off the engine. They squatted behind the driver’s door and peered through the car’s windows to the office.

Rebecca saw vague shadows moving against the glass. They were heads lit mildly by an orange glow.

Kells dropped back down, eyeing their surroundings. He was breathing deeply again, trancelike. A knife was in his right hand.

She was numb from the cold and could barely move. She felt dazed.

A noise from the office and Kells looked through the car windows again, then ducked back quick.

The door opened. Two pairs of boots hit the oil-stained floor and the door clicked shut and the boots sounded like they were coming right toward them. Rebecca gripped the shotgun to keep it from rattling in her hands and giving them away.

The boots passed the VW’s rusted front bumper. She turned her head slowly, as though her neck would make noise. The men ducked underneath the open garage door into the IRVING light, looked around, then turned left, back toward the rear.

Kells was ready to move. He pointed forcefully toward the office door, then rose to pursue the pursuers. Rebecca grabbed after him but he was already away, creeping agilely along the wall of the garage, ducking under the door, turning after them.

Then she was alone in the awful silence of the service station garage. She was still a moment, then shuffled around to the rear of the VW. It was as though Kells had put her in a trance too. She was amazed she was moving at all.

She crossed the garage to the office door. She waited a long time there, far too long, clutching the empty shotgun. She was waiting for Kells to return.

She would look just once. Then she would pull back and keep waiting.

She turned toward the door glass. One man sat in a wooden folding chair, his face and hands inches from the space heater of glowing orange coils. He was a white man, his heated, brassy face bore the broad insolence of a lifelong bully.

She turned back after only a second, secretly thrilled with her invisibility, waiting, waiting. The shotgun was weightless in her hands. Her breathing was still problematic, but she rode it out like a swimmer tumbling beneath a breaking wave, waiting to float to the surface.

The squeak of the office chair turned her head. A familiar click-click-click noise inside, buttons being punched. She held her breath, turning for another quick glance.

The con was on his feet now. A big man, broad and sloppy. He was trying to dial out on the dead telephone.

Rebecca’s hands tightened on the shotgun. There was a police radio coiled on the service counter. The con was moving to it.

She did not know what was happening until she was standing inside the office and facing him, the shotgun leveled at his chest.

“Right there,” she said. By that she meant, “Don’t move.” She jabbed the shotgun barrel toward the radio in his hand. “Down. Put it.” The power of speech was failing her.

With the shock of her entrance came a dose of fear. At first the con obeyed, setting the radio back down on the counter.

Then the initial scare began to wear off. He saw that she was a woman. He recognized fright in her face.

“The writer,” he said, his expression becoming a crooked smile.

A swallow caught in her throat. They knew her. Again she tightened her grip on the shotgun.

He looked her over slowly. Seconds passed and she could sense him growing bolder and bolder.

Now he was looking at the shotgun. He said, “What are you waiting for?”

Kells, she thought, but Rebecca could not reply. Her mouth was tight, lips fixed, her mind cracking like an ice cube in a hot water.

The con’s pistol lay on one of the wooden chairs, oranged by the glowing heater. She saw his eyes cheat there and she was on the verge of panic. She wished she had bullets to shoot him.

The con was relaxing, his arms growing loose. His fingers twitched.

“You can’t shoot me,” he said. “Can you.”

She could not find the words. She could not say or move or do anything.

Slowly and defiantly, eyes trained on her, he moved a half-step closer to the chair. “You’re too afraid,” he said.

The word Don’t would not fall from her lips.

His smile spread, fierce and jagged, like a crack threading through thick glass. All at once he lunged for his weapon.

Rebecca rushed forward. She hit him with the shotgun. In movies they usually swing the butt end around, but all Rebecca could do was run the muzzle at him like a sword. She had aimed for his chest but as he ducked for his gun she caught him on the side of the forehead over his right eye. There was a snap of broken bone and the con staggered backward, off balance.

He stopped there, holding his head. His hand came away and blood filled the indentation over his eye socket and spilled in a thin line down the side of his face.

“Fuck!” he said. “Oh, you fucking—”

Correcting her previous bad form, Rebecca pivoted and brought the butt end around before he could move again, cracking the man sharply across his left ear. The blow whipped his head around and rocked him sideways. He fell throat-first against the edge of the counter, then sagged to one side, spilling to the floor.

The counter edge had crushed his windpipe. Rich, red blood from his head wound pooled beneath him as he lay choking to death. Rebecca stood over him, poised to strike again as the man went into convulsions. His hands opened and closed on nothing, forming tight, trembling fists, then opening slowly and for the last time.

Awful silence again. She stumbled backward against the heater, never taking her eyes off him.

Kells entered behind her with Tom Duggan. Kells took one look at the dead man and pulled the shotgun out of her hands. The butt end was cracked and he tossed the broken weapon away. He grabbed her arms, shaking her until her eyes rose to meet his.

There was a strange bit of fluff in his tight black hair. She reached up for it, fascinated. It was a tiny feather, a shred of down from one of the prisoners’ jackets.

Suddenly everything seemed hundreds of yards away. Adrenaline swirled in her mouth like sugar and her legs would not support her anymore.

Kells seemed to understand. He left her sitting in a wooden folding chair inside the front glass door of the station office while he worked. The Volkswagen Rabbit’s diesel engine turned over, and he ran it out of the service garage, plowing through the snow to knock over both pumps. Gasoline came spurting and there was no overhang, no safety devices, foam sprinklers, or alarms. He located, dug up, and pried off the underground storage tank caps on either side of the small island, while Tom Duggan dutifully tied together oily rags from the garage, feeding them into the holes. Kells moved seemingly on instinct, arranging his sabotage like a muralist working in a creative frenzy, while Rebecca watched and felt no sense of exigency at all.

He tasked her only once, handing over two red jugs of gasoline with instructions to stash them on the other side of the taxidermist’s house. She did this, passing the tangled bodies of the other two cons in the bloodied snow. Behind the taxidermist’s she was finally sick, watching her vomit splash into the virgin snow, hearing herself gurgle, but feeling nothing. She returned to Kells and the smell of gasoline was thick now, the cold air turned sticky, the station undulating like a mirage, rising fumes meeting the falling snow. There was a large, white propane refilling tank in one corner of the lot and Kells left it hissing, striding through the haze back inside the station. He reemerged with a Zippo lighter and a smaller red jug, pouring out a trail of diesel fuel as the three of them retreated across Post Road. He lit the fuse there. He did not wait to watch it burn.

Rebecca was stepping into a snowshoe binding as the first underground tank blew. A moment of hissing wind and a tremor, as though the earth had sucked in a full breath, then a tremendous eruption that dropped all three of them to the snow. The ground buckled and roared and the heat was immediate, oranging the snow and bowing the trees. Tree trunks snapped back and ice and snow plummeted down from above, pelting and nearly burying them.

A second, smaller blast followed, lacking the oxygen resources of the first. Rebecca felt a hand grip her coat collar and she got to her feet, shaking off the snow and branch debris, some of it flaming. The IRVING sign had fallen and Tom Duggan watched with the fire in his eyes, light and shadow flaring on his face. The wind swirled and smaller explosions ripped behind them as they turned and fled back up the slope, Kells paced them through the raining fire and ice.

Chapter 21

Tom Duggan took them along ice streams to obscure their snowshoe tracks, and the rising winds ensured that they could not be followed back to the vet’s. By the time they returned, the wind was such that the snow was blowing sideways past the windows, as though the house were in a spin. It was a kind of madness, this town she had lost herself in.

Polk lay on the bed with his arms at his sides, his feet propped up on the pillows. His shirt was tugged up to his chest, exposing flesh as pale as turkey meat. He was very weak, but his only complaint was thirst. He kept glancing up at the ceiling as though he saw someone there.

Tom Duggan took a chair next to him, and in a quiet voice he told him about the gas station.

“Blow it all up.” The old man chuckled. “Burn it all down.”

Rebecca leaned against the cologne-stained dresser. She felt wasted, observing the room rather than existing in it. She had killed a man and stood over him as he died. Like suicide, murder took precious little effort in relation to the decision to act. The will to murder was all.

Kells was redolent of the gasoline and smoke, having carried all the fury of the explosion back with him. To leave the bedroom, he had to walk past Rebecca.

“You knew they would be there,” she said. “Why did you do that to me?”

He stopped in the doorway. “What did I do?”

“You made me kill him.”

“No. He made you kill him.”

She remembered the way she had looked at Kells after the killings at the country club. She wondered how people would look at her if she ever made it out of Gilchrist. Then she thought how strange it seemed to contemplate any existence outside the town. This was how murder occurred, she realized: The killer believed she was acting inside a closed system.

Tom Duggan was standing now, looking down at Polk.

“No hospitals, Tommy,” Polk said. “No transfusions. Diseases in the blood.”

Even his paranoid rantings were losing fervor. “We’ll see, Marshall.”

“In the end, Tom. In the end...”

“Don’t talk about the end,” Tom Duggan said. “Don’t worry about anything.”

As they were leaving, Coe met them in the hallway. He was rested now and excitable again. The patchy stubble on his face made him look slightly goofy. “He asked me for the phone number to the inn,” he said.

They followed Coe back to the vet’s office. Rebecca moved clumsily, as though inhabiting a new body, uncertain how well it worked.

The speakerphone was ringing. Inside, Kells stood behind the vet’s desk. Mia and Dr. Rosen were there, and Dr. Rosen asked Kells what he was doing. Then the telephone was answered.

Kells said, “This is Clock. I want to speak to Luther Trait.”

The rest of them held fast. Rebecca remained inside the doorway, near Tom Duggan.

Muffled words, then Trait’s unmistakable voice through the exaggerated speakerphone. “This is Trait.”

“We took out your fuel supply and four more men. That brings your total population down to about forty, by my count.”

Trait paused, then answered with confidence. “Gasoline means nothing to us right now. Once the snow clears we will take delivery of whatever supplies we need.”

Kells said, “You will not last here that long.”

“You underestimate me. As I have underestimated you — until now. There are some Marielitos here who would like to meet with you to discuss the killing and mutilation of their countrymen.”

“They have to catch me first. How long until their frustration turns on you?”

“We all share a bond here, the persecution we suffered at ADX Gilchrist. We all wear the same battle scar.”

“All except one.”

“Yes. Except one. I wonder why you didn’t ask to speak to him?”

“Inkman will betray you. You must know this by now. The takeover of this town was a classic CIA coup, only Inkman is bankrolling it with your lives instead of cash. We put up governments and tore them down again, and walked away unscathed every time. Does the term ‘puppet dictator’ mean anything to you? How long will it be before he kills you and takes over?”

Trait emitted a practiced laugh. “You are trying to play me,” he said. “Inkman views your presence here as a threat. I do not. To me you are an opportunity, a challenge. The takeover here was too easy, too efficient, too programmed. We are warriors. What is a warrior without a war?”

“A criminal.”

“Your death will be the rock upon which this community of warriors is forged. I think you being here might turn out to be the best thing that could have happened to us.”

“You will find I am not a problem to be solved. I am more of a problem-solver.”

“Is the writer there with you?”

The rest of them turned. Rebecca thought she was going to fall to the floor.

Kells was silent, waiting. Rebecca wanted to rush away.

She heard herself speak. She heard herself say: “Yes.”

A long pause on the other side.

“You stayed,” said Trait.

Bewilderment and terror. Simply to have made an impression on a monster such as Luther Trait was appalling.

He continued, “I said we would meet again on my terms.”

She searched for a response. Kells’s eyes were dark, his killer’s face sharp.

Trait went on, “I won’t be responsible for what happens if my men find you first. But tell me where you are right now, and I will come get you. I will treat you well. You know you can’t win here. What chance do you have against a crew of motivated killers? You know Clock must fail. You have one chance to survive — and I say this to anyone else listening as well. Kill Clock in his sleep. Kill him before he gets you killed. You will be spared and rewarded.”

Her anger surprised her. “I won’t be your prize,” she said quickly.

“All in time,” he said. “I said if there were no jails or laws, you would align yourself with a warrior like me. Only, for now, you picked the wrong warrior. But this town is getting smaller by the hour. Look outside your window tonight and you will see.”

The click told her Trait had hung up.

Kells turned off the vet’s phone with a beep. He was contemplative for a moment. “He’s thinking about Inkman now.”

Tom Duggan said, “What did he mean about looking out our window?”

Kells was listening now. Rebecca heard it too.

Noises outside. A soft thumping, rhythmic, like feet running hard through the thick snow.

Kells dashed from the windowless office past Rebecca into the hallway, and she followed him into the TV room. She was certain it was Jasper Grue.

Kells sidled up to the front window. He showed her an open hand to quiet her footsteps on the uncarpeted floor as the noise of the tramping grew closer. Kells drew the Beretta from the back of his pants and held it at his side, turning to the glass. The room was dark enough for her to see the snow blowing outside. She gripped the wall as Tom Duggan appeared behind her.

Kells relaxed, standing full in front of the window, the gun hanging loose.

A riderless horse pranced into view. He was black and kicking in the delirious snow, snorting lungfuls of steam, an orange and brown blanket leaping off his back. He spun around and around before the window, triggering the outside motion light which illuminated his dark coat and ebony eyes, spooking him into wheeling and galloping away.

Rebecca moved to the cold window as the snow-kicks faded from view.

“Look out there,” said Kells, next to her.

She shook her head. The horse was magnificent and strange. “He’s gone.”

“Way out there. Keep looking.”

They had a good view of the southern section of town. The snow was whipping but thin, and through it, well in the distance, she picked out a slight glow.

“Sunrise?” she said.

“Keep looking.”

Like an optical illusion coming into focus, a distant pattern emerged. Rebecca’s eyes adjusted to the sight of small fires burning along the outer hills.

Tom Duggan moved behind them. “Cabins and hunting shacks in the woods. They’re burning them down.”

“To cut us off,” said Kells, “draw us closer. This is good.”

Rebecca turned. “How is that good?”

“Because it shows respect. Trait was cool on the phone, but we’re getting to him. We need to keep applying pressure. We need to keep moving.”

He backed away as the others emerged into the room. He was looking at Tom Duggan.

“We need to be close to the town common,” Kells said. “Someplace well-hidden, but within striking distance.”

Tom Duggan nodded somberly. “I know of a place.”